On Tuesday, the paper’s editorial committee was to hold a fourth round of negotiations with its top management, which is part of the provincial propaganda office, according to a Southern Weekly editor. The editor spoke on condition of anonymity because of an internal directive not to talk to the foreign media.

Propaganda officials want the newspaper to publish — as per normal — on Thursday but editors are negotiating over whether to do so, and the terms under which they would be willing, for example, if they could include a letter to readers explaining the incident, the editor said.

The committee is also pushing a larger appeal to abolish censorship of the newspaper’s content prior to publication, the editor said. The suggestion is that Communist Party leaders could provide direction but not interfere with reporting and editing, and should refrain from taking issue with content until after publication, the editor said.

The scuffles broke out after supporters of the paper, published on Thursdays, jeered and skirmished with a small band of leftists holding posters of Chairman Mao Zedong and signs denouncing the Southern Weekly as “a traitor newspaper” for defying the party.

“These people (leftists) are paid agitators of the government, twisting the truth with propaganda. We had to do something about it,” said pro-press freedom protester Cheng Qiubo.

Dozens of police officers had to intervene, though the protests were allowed to continue. Two technicians with a ladder tried to rig a surveillance camera to the branch of a tree outside the newspaper gates, but were swiftly surrounded and shouted down by angry crowds and forced to retreat.

The Economist’s James Miles observed (using the newspaper’s alternative English name):

[… T]hese include some of Chinese social media’s most high profile users from all walks of life. Celebrities such as actress Yao Chen (with 31 million followers) and actor Chen Kui (with 27 million followers) tweeted explicit messages of support on Sina Weibo, a microblog platform. Yao quoted the 1970 Nobel lecture of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author and dissident, along with a logo of Southern Weekend. Chen was more direct: “I am not that deep, and I don’t play word games; I support the friends at Southern Weekend.”

[…] Ren Zhiqiang (@任志强), one of the most outspoken businessmen in China with almost 13 million followers, tweeted on Sina Weibo, “Freedom of press and freedom of speech are rights given to the society and the people by the constitution; they are also symbols of human rights and freedom. Yet they have become pipe dreams without the rule of law, being seriously distorted and restricted. If truth is not allowed to be spoken, would truth disappear?”

Li Chengpeng and Han Han, China’s two most famous bloggers, both wrote articles in support of Southern Weekend. Li wrote, “We don’t need tall buildings, but we need a newspaper that speaks the truth. We don’t need the second highest GDP in the world, but we need a newspaper that speaks the truth. We don’t need a fleet of aircraft carriers, but we need a newspaper that speaks the truth.”

These people are making spirited demands, and while on the surface they are going after a specific person and event, its obvious to everyone watching that their target is the entire system that involves the media.

Whether these people like it or not, this is common sense: given the current state of China’s society and government, the kind of “free media” that these people yearn for in their hearts simply cannot exist. All of China’s media can develop only to the extent China does, and media reform must remain part-and-parcel of China’s overall reform, and the media absolutely will not become a “political special zone” of China.

[…] Even in the West, the mainstream media will not choose to openly oppose the government.

If it is true, as Berkeley’s China Digital Times reports, that media have been issued a propaganda directive on the Southern Weekly incident that deflects blame from Guangdong propaganda officials toward foreign “hostile forces,” that is not an encouraging sign.

Readers should understand that the Southern Weekly crisis is not just a face-off between pro-reform voices and status-quo Party conservatives. In this case, it was propaganda officials in Guangdong — the spiritual heart of China’s reform and opening — who upset the status-quo by exercising censorship to such an intrusive extent that the situation became unacceptable to working journalists, most of whom had already made an uneasy peace with media controls.

The crisis at the Nanfang Media Group is not just about whether Xi Jinping is serious about the ostensible new openness and responsiveness attributed to him by sustained state propaganda. It is about whether China could be moving backward on the issue of media freedom, which would send worrying signals about the overall direction of the new leadership.

At The Wall Street Journal, Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn also discussed the situation in terms of prospects for media and internet freedom, saying that “I don’t believe there’s anybody in the senior leadership who’s committed to those ideals.”

This is Mr Xi’s first serious test and early indications suggest that he is treading carefully. Demonstrations have been lightly policed and yesterday the People’s Daily, the party’s official outlet, said that propaganda officials should “follow the rhythm of the times” and help the authorities create a “pragmatic and open-minded image”. On the face of it, this heralds a welcome and more tolerant official approach to the media. Whether or not it amounts to anything of substance will become clear in the next few days.

Under Hu’s deal, the source said, newspaper workers would end their strike and return to work, the paper would print as normal this week, and most staff would not face punishment. “Guangdong’s Hu personally stepped in to resolve this,” the source said.

“He gets personal image points by showing that he has guts and the ability to resolve complex situations. In addition, the signal that he projects through this is one of relative openness, it’s a signal of a leader who is relatively steady.”

The standoff at the Southern Weekly, long seen as a beacon of independent and in-depth reporting in China’s highly controlled media landscape, has led to demands for the country’s new leadership to grant greater media freedoms.

[…]

It wasn’t possible to immediately corroborate Hu’s involvement in brokering the deal with editorial staff, who may be bound by an agreement not to speak out.